Braised beef with red onions & wild mushrooms
On a cold March Sunday, I had a need for a slow-cooked, rich, warming, dish. It was snowing outside for goodness sake! Like a lot of people, despite having a bookcase full of recipe books, I surfed the web a little and found an ideal recipe on the BBC good food website and thought I would give it a try.
This blog post is inspired by this recipe - and it features beef, mushrooms and port - three of my favourite ingredients!
I made this dish with a lovely LBV port, although a tawny or ruby would be as good. The nice part is you do not need a full bottle, so the chef's treat is built into this recipe.
You could make this equally with cubed stewing steak, and it would end up closer to a beef bourguignon, but there is something nice about serving a steak-sized piece of meat, slow cooked until tender.
Brown the meat off in batches to get the important browning on the surface. The Maillard reaction caramelises the sugars on the surface which gives a depth to the final dish. If you over crowd the pan the meat will start to stew with the moisture released, so do it in batches.
Fry the red onions in the same pan as the beef. It may look like a lot of onions, but they cook down into a lovely sweet tangled mess. As the onions release their juices use these to deglaze the pan, scrape up those valuable flavours from the beef.
The flour added to the onions and cooked out a little helps to make the port into a thicker sauce. Add the soaked dried porcini, liquid and port. Clamp the lid on tight, and pop in the oven and forget about it. Now is a good time to have that small glass of the remaining port.
After a couple of hours, and about 15 minutes before you want to eat, add the chestnut mushrooms. The sauce was a bit too thin for me at this point, so I added cornflour mixed with a bit of warm water to thicken it up.
The end result is a warming, rich, meaty dish, with a decent sized piece of meat each. It is perfect served with some kind of mash to soak up the juices, potato, cauliflower, or even a roasted garlic chickpea mash.
I used the leftover sauce as a coating for some polish pirogi.
